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60 Years of DESY: From Hamburg Particle Accelerator to Global Research Center

For the past 60 years, fundamental research has been carried out at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg-Bahrenfeld. In those 60 years, DESY has become a world leader in accelerator technology, structure research, particle physics and astroparticle physics. DESY has developed pioneering technologies, which have been used by scientists from...

Jefferson Lab to be Major Partner in Brookhaven Electron Ion Collider Project

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it has taken the next step toward the construction of an Electron Ion Collider (EIC) in the United States. DOE announced that the collider will be sited at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton NY. In addition, DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility...

The Pocket-Sized Particle Accelerator

The accelerator-on-a-chip is just a prototype, but its design and fabrication techniques can be scaled up to deliver particle beams accelerated enough to perform cutting-edge experiments that don’t require the power of a massive accelerator. By placing these chips in a series, researchers from SLAC National Laboratory and Stanford University...

QuinStar Completes Contribution to NASA Mission

QuinStar (CSA CSM) has successfully completed a 28-month program with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that developed flight hardware for the NASA-ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission. QuinStar’s deliverables included Ka-band solid-state power amplifiers—an enabling element of the communication payload for the high speed, space-to-earth datalink.

Italian Energy Company Doubles Blend of Hydrogen

Italian energy infrastructure company Snam has doubled the volume of hydrogen it is blending with natural gas in the transmission network of southern Contursi Terme, Salerno, Italy, in a new experiment that would enable the reduction of the region’s carbon dioxide emissions by five million tons.

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Dewar

A dewar is a type of cryostat named after Sir James Dewar, the researcher who first developed the concept of a vacuum insulated container with silvered walls to reflect thermal radiation. Dewar was the first to liquefy hydrogen, and he created the device to store his discovery. The thermos bottle...

Stirling and Gifford-McMahon Cryocoolers

Stirling and Gifford-McMahon (GM) cryocoolers are two of the most commonly used cryocoolers in cryogenics. Both devices have a significant industrial base and operate at a wide range of temperatures and capacities. The thermodynamic cycles for both of these cryocoolers are quite similar. The Stirling cycle consists of a compressor,...

Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)

A significant commercial application of cryogenics is the liquefaction, transport and storage of natural gas. Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is generally 95 percent methane with a few percent ethane and much lower concentrations of propane and butane. LNG liquefies at 111.6 K. Unlike many applications of cryogenics, the motivation for...

Magnets

From “Superconductivity: Present and Future Applications” by the Coalition for the Commercial Application of Superconductors. Particle physics uses accelerators to recreate the conditions of the early universe in an attempt to piece together the complex puzzle of how we got to where we are today. These huge machines are used...

Energy Storage

From “Superconductivity: Present and Future Applications” by the Coalition for the Commercial Application of Superconductors. With power lines increasingly congested and prone to instability, strategic injection of brief bursts of real power can play a crucial role in maintaining grid reliability. Small-scale Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) systems, based on...

Astronomy

ASTRONOMY IN SPACE by Peter V. Mason, retired,  Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Visiting Associate, California Institute of Technology. Pmason@alumni.caltech.edu In thinking about the reasons to perform astronomy in space, we first consider the effect of the earth’s atmosphere.  On a scale of decreasing energy, gamma rays, cosmic rays, X-rays and...

Cryocoolers

What is a Cryocooler? A mechanism that can extract heat from an object (cooler) and by doing so draw its temperature down below approximately 150 Kelvin (cryo). — (Courtesy Dr. Willy Gully) What is the difference between a Cryocooler and a Cryostat? A cryostat is any device designed to maintain...